Overview

Inventas cloud solution has an exceptional record for availability. Our customers have not experienced any unforeseen downtime in the last 24 month period. This means that against an industry standard SLA of 99.9% or 17.5 hours over the same 24 month period Inventas has exceeded this SLA.

To achieve this high availability each element of Inventas cloud solution is designed for redundancy. Inventas utilises technology from our key technology partners including HP, Microsoft, VMware and Citrix.

Inventas uses Citrix to provide the best user experience via the Citrix Receiver and Citrix XenApp platform. The platform is built on HP servers, HP SANs with Cisco networking hardware for security and intrusion protection.

Data Centres

Inventas cloud services are operated from UK data centres, based in Byfleet, Surrey, with data being backed up to a separate UK data centre, based in Manchester, providing a geographically diverse infrastructure for your data.

UK data centres were chosen to ensure that all data remains located within the UK. The two data centres are sufficiently far apart to satisfy the most stringent disaster recovery requirements. The data centre in Byfleet, Surrey is accessible from Inventas within 30min. Both data centres provide a high tier solution comprising of diverse networking from multiple providers, redundant power, cooling and fire protection with 24/7 manned on-site security.

The Surrey data centre is operated by 4D and Inventas has a co-location agreement for its own rack. Inventas owns and operates the equipment and pays a rental for the rack space and power. A key decision for Inventas to use 4D as a co-location partner is their green credentials.

The Surrey data centre has pioneered CO2 reduction techniques for the IT Industry. The award-winning data centre in Surrey now operates with an impressive PUE of 1.14 which makes it one of the greenest data centres on the planet and also boasts many blue chip tenants. As a co-location Services provider, 4D operates 4 data centres across the UK.

The second data centre, in Manchester is operated by TelecityGroup. The data centre is an exceptionally high specification reliable and secure UK co-location space.

As with all roles within the infrastructure the servers are virtualised on high specification HP server and SAN hardware and Inventas use two of the industry leading hypervisors for virtualisation. The physical host’s standard specification has dual quad core processors, dual power supply taken from separate feeds and dual NIC connected to separate switches. On the HP iSCSI SAN Inventas utilise the faster spinning SAS hard drives for faster data access and performance.

The Inventas cluster of servers that host all VM’s are virtualised using Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology with high availability clustering including Active Passive and Majority Node Set. This means that in the event of a failure of a server all VM’s on the failed server would be automatically transferred to another server within the cluster keeping downtime to an absolute minimum. If a host suffered a major outage such as blue screen then the user’s session would be interrupted but will be reconnected within a few minutes whilst it’s being transferred.

Network

Within the Surrey data centre there is resilience within the network architecture with fast, high capacity bandwidth from multiple providers like BT, Virgin Media /NTL, Geo and Global Crossing.

Cisco ASA Firewall provides the network security. This is then connected to Cisco and HP gigabit switch hardware. The standard hardware configuration for servers is dual network connectivity running to two separate switches. There is Gigabit connectivity between the two data centres.

Storage & Backup

Storage and back-up are critical components in delivering any cloud service. Inventas has invested in best of class storage and back-up technologies that enable it to perform the most important function – looking after a company’s data.

Inventas uses storage technology from HP, a global leader in IT. At the heart of Inventas philosophy is that users should be able to work faster and more efficiently, whether it’s from their PC, laptop or tablet, using all the familiar applications they would use in a non-cloud environment.

All company data, email and databases are backed up every day across a high speed internet link to the Manchester data centre ensuring multiple copies of data are available in different geographical locations in case of a disaster.

Accreditations

Inventas has achieved and maintains a number of accreditations that are important to give customers and potential customer’s confidence in our systems. Inventas is a Microsoft Partner, Citrix Service Provider and VMware Solutions Provider.